1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to opinion surveys or poll-taking and, more specifically, to apparatus and methods for conducting such surveys or polls with maximum accuracy.
2. Prior Art
Opinion surveys, or polls, have become popular working tools for politicians, sociologists, statisticians, criminologists and many others wishing to predict or explain mass attitudes of the populace or segments thereof. The standard technique in conducting such a poll or survey is, after designating the interviewees to be sampled, to design a questionnaire which, typically, has multitudinous questions, with many of the questions having extensive subparts. The subparts may call for the application by an interviewee of a subjective scaling of his answer-- e.g., "on a scale of 1 to 9 which classification would you give to your answer, 1 being equivalent to a flat `yes` and 9 being equivalent to an unequivocal `no`?"
With prior-art techniques the interviewer had to spend a great deal of time presenting the question, oftimes introducing his own biases or pre-disposition in the process. This has been particularly true when the interviewer or the questionnaire is operating in a language which is not the interviewee's first language. Inconsistencies and errors were the results. These errors were further compounded when the answers were coded, prior to card keypunch operations, and further errors could and did occur in the keypunch operations. The overall result was, for any particular survey, the probability of significant error in the survey and in the interpretation of those results.
Therefore, it is a primary object of this invention to provide a method and apparatus for implementing that method which avoids, in poll-taking or opinion surveys, the errors inherent in prior methods and apparatus for conducting such surveys.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a method and apparatus which eliminates from the results of opinion surveys errors arising from interviewer bias and language limitations of the interviewee.
It is a still further object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for conducting opinion surveys which eliminates human mechanical errors in coding and keypunching of interview data.
It is an additional object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus which produces in the results of an opinion survey the maximum accuracy of representation of one or more interviewee's responses.